In The Rain
by Endre Tamak
Summary: an alternate timeline fic, centered around neptune and uranus, occurring before the deathbusters set of the manga, but after the black moon(manga timeline, though it also includes anime aspects.)
1. The Daring

I sit with my knees to my chest, sleepless again, because of all the strange dreams, watching the bleary colours of dawn lighting the spreading view out of the large window. Traffic has begun to move on the streets below, as the businesses demand their employees hurry to them. Poor little people, how I love them all. As for me, I have no call today, no demands on my time.   
I lean back against the wall of the alcove...  
And it is noon, and I eat something stale from the fridge, and return to the window seat with a book I don't really notice, enchanted by the view.  
  
The beautiful girl from science class, who watches me with those serious, troubled eyes that hastily move away when I look back at her, has come to my door. I watch her shy, halting movements through the window as she struggles to bring herself to ring my doorbell. Perhaps it's unkind, as she is uncomfortable, but sometimes it's wonderful to remember how young we really are, despite the pressure and formality of our lives. Finally she wins, the buzzer rings, and I realise that I am all the way across the apartment from the intercom. I sprint towards the door as the buzzer rings again, knocking over the coffee table, upsetting a lamp, rumpling rugs and bruising my knees to get to the door before she becomes discouraged.   
"Who's there?" I hope I don't sound breathless.  
"I-it's Kaioh Michiru."  
"C'mon up." I buzz her in, and hurry to set things straight again, as she comes up the five flights. I have just finished righting the table when she knocks. I take a deep breath and open the door with a wide smile.  
"Good morning Haruka-san, I hope I'm not intruding on your time."  
"Hi! No, of course not. Come in?"  
She bows her head, as if in a nod that became stuck, and smiles again. I step aside, and she moves into my home like a beam of sunlight.  
I motion for her to take a seat on the couch, calm and polite, though my insides are fluttering, and my hands shake slightly. "Would you like something to drink?"  
"Oh, no, I'm alright."  
"Alright," I nod and sit down in what I call the "Patriarch's Chair," a high-backed leather piece, which had come from my father's study.  
"I, ah, I know that it is very impolite not to call ahead-"  
"I don't mind, I'm not big on formalities."  
"I wouldn't have, but, I have something very important, and, well, highly unbelievable to tell you."  
The dreamlike aspect of the last weeks seemed to peek in her pale, delicate face...


	2. Troubled

Haruka was left with the uncomfortable feeling that she must be quite thoroughly insane. Indeed, absolutely, institutionalize-ably, stark raving mad. Her sea-green haired visitor had completely sold her on this wild story of destinies, antique mirrors, mysterious forces, and troubling visions; all things that Haruka would have expected herself to find utterly ridiculous. Today, however, she had believed Michiru as the girl told her about the re-occurring vision of Haruka within the surface of the lovely, ancient silver mirror that she had drawn from her bag. "This all must sound quite laughable, Haruka-san, especially coming from someone who might as well be a complete stranger, but I feel that we will be very important to each other. Somehow, I feel we may also be simply very important." Haruka refused to think about it any longer, she proceeded into the living room with her luke-warm coffee and set about thinking of more pleasant things. Or would have, if she could have thought of any. All she could think of were the dark clouds of dream images that Michiru's words had summoned up: dark, vast expanses of emptiness whipped constantly by gale winds, starry voids filled with hidden demons, swirling silver- white hair and magnanimous, if plastic smiles, and the shining blade of what could only be the ancient family sword, that any Tenoh would tell you had belonged to some great prince or princess of some country, the name of which none could agree on. In reality, of course, the sword was now nothing but a tarnished hilt; the blade long since rusted away. Haruka wondered idly where the sword was now; which of her horrid, bickering, hateful relatives had laid their greedy paws on the family treasures which were 'rightfully theirs'. Truth be told, she wouldn't have cared, she had no use for the Tenoh family grudge match, but she was suddenly over come with a desire to hold the hilt of the blade in her hand, and trace her fingers along the elegant silver- working. It hit her with the force of a bullet train: the style of the metal work in the hilt matched that of Michiru's mirror! She had to stop thinking about all of this rubbish. Abandoning her untouched coffee on one of the small tables that sided the sofa, she fetched her coat from the hall closet and, before leaving, announced to the apartment, "I've gone to find myself a loony bin, don't burn down yourself while I'm gone."  
  
Luck, coincidences, and a small world be damned! As soon as she had settled into a comfortably grungy booth in a comfortably grungy food- serving establishment of some indistinguishable variety, in walked none other than the lovely Kaioh Michiru, accompanied by the scum of the earth. Or, at least, a boy who looked like he could have been the spokesman for the scum of the earth. He was filthy, torn and over-bleached, and his clothes were worse. The most truly offensive part of him was, of course, the sharp contrast he made to Michiru's elegant fall garb, and shining cleanliness. Haruka would have like nothing better than to dislocate the arm he had slung about the green haired girl's waist. Well, that wasn't strictly true, what she would have liked better was to be several blocks (if not cities, prefects, countries, or continents) away from the lovely cause of her mental discomfort. She slunk down in her booth, waited until they had seated themselves at the counter, and then slunk out. All right, so bad food and grungy atmosphere were not going to solve her mystic mood. When in doubt, rent a bad American horror flick. After two episodes of the Friday the 13th series (dubbed, as she had hardly felt up to exercising her English) she was feeling much better, in a strange, adolescent 'blood is funny' sort of way, and felt she could probably go to sleep with immunity.  
  
Haruka did not, however, go to sleep. She shed her clothing and lowered herself into bed, closed her eyes, in complete mental peace. She was instantly assaulted by the image of her father holding the ancient silver hilt up in the light of a lamp, squinting at the patterns. Kevin Tenoh-Darling, the American liberal who had been more like a good friend than a father. When she asked for a bed time story he read to her from his own books, and always allowed her exposure to any and all media he himself made use of. Her father had always treated her like an adult, spoke to her calmly and reasonably, been supportive of her aspirations, and rational in the face of her tempers. He had been her accomplice in many a crime, had taken her to see her first race, and had driven her to school on his classy silver BMW motorcycle. He had hated the quarrels of his wife's family, called them petty, meaningless. It was from him that Haruka had learned her distaste for the needlessly hateful. He was gentle and loving with his wife, raucous and fun loving with his friends and everything to his only child, his lovely girl who would have killed to be his little boy. Haruka had always wanted to be her father. They had spent a summer at her grandmother's home once, and, to avoid the cousins and aunts and uncles, the bickering, and the disapproving glances, 30 year old man and 12 year old girl had spent there days outside of the house, or hidden in the attic. They had pored over the old treasures of her mother's family in a most irreverent fashion. Cries of 'junk' echoed through the dusty vault as they scrambled through boxes for days on end, until, "Look at this!" He held her mother's coveted heirloom up to the light, wonderingly, for a moment, before tucking it into his jacket. It had remained with them for two years until her mother's death, and then. Her father had sent it to his family! Her eyes snapped open; she knew where to find the sword!


	3. The Boy, The Mirror, and The New She

She left his apartment in the dead of night at a dead run. She had left him passed out on the couch, the television babbling an infomercial, spittle oozing down his chin. 

A horrible pity dwelled deep in her heart, terrified her, and drove her from him now. The boy's fate horrified her, and bound her to him by day, but, when he fell asleep the horror would overwhelm her and she would leave him to his dreams.

She had met Ame a year before, and at first, she had been honestly interested in him. The confusing coupling of filthy, dark, and disreputable image and charming smile, quick wit, and innate talent for romance had been nearly irresistible to her, but now…Now she clung to him out of pity and fear: fear of herself, of the bizarre fantasy that had come to rule her life, and pity for a charming boy who did not know he was dying.

It was one of the earlier things the mirror, which seemed to have deep insight into the health of the human body, had shown Michiru. Fixing her hair one morning, worrying about what she knew she must tell Ame, she had watched in wonder _as the surface of the hand mirror rippled, softly, like a bubbling stream. Slowly it had ushered forth the image of the boy's face, smiling wanly, dark eyes bereft of their characteristic sparkle. He was pale, and shaking; he coughed, harshly, blood spattered the hospital blanket covering his emaciated frame. The coughing weakened, lessened, but not, it seemed, in an easing of his travail, but an ending of it. As she watched in amazement and dread, he faded slowly with the intensity of his coughs. Finally, his head went limp against the pillow; the body ceased its heaving under the covers…_

She seemed to see death, and life, and ills all around her now; whenever she glanced at the silver heirloom. Did the girl on the park bench behind her know she was pregnant? How long had that poor man suffered migraines? It was maddening, terrifying, and absolutely fascinating at the same time.

She liked the babies best, _the tiny prenatal balls of beings, shifting ever so slightly in the warm, dark safety of their mothers…_

She submerged her face in the bathroom sink, to free her skin of the salt of her tears, and sighed. He seemed frailer every day, and he refused to recognise it. If she expressed concern he would laugh and kiss her gently, "Ah, I'm just undernourished…Buy me lunch?" She'd have thought it denial, but he seemed so sweetly honest, and so oblivious to the doom she saw him rushing to…She was deeply sorry, now, that she had ever known him, for his sake more than her own. Some other girl, some other woman, might have had the strength to make him face his affliction, might have dragged him to a doctor, might have taken proper care of him. Michiru could not; she had seen too much of the crushing effect of illness on the spirit to bring him face to face with his imminent death.

She dried her face gently with the green hand towel hanging above the toilet, and gave herself a long look in the mirror. She didn't _look_ much different than she had three or four months before, but….Nothing was the same.


	4. Blood Rain

They moved closer together, by fates own power, it seemed. They caught glimpses of each other, where-ever they went, and the very next semester they shared every class. And everywhere Michiru went, that boy was there as well.

It was wearing heavily on Haruka's nerves. She thought she might take a very long holiday.

It was in Chemistry, of course, that the world stopped.

Well, no, it wasn't anything so horribly dramatic as that, but it _was_ horrific. 

She was leaning over her notes with purely affected attention (actually watching fixedly as her teacher's toupé slid slowly down the back of his head, tugging at the hairpins holding it on.), when she heard a horrible scraping sound behind her. Someone in the back began to cough: huge, hacking, hideous, lung-twisting coughs. She jumped to her feet and whirled around to see Michiru's ever-sickly companion spewing blood across a lab table, and clutching helplessly at his chest.

It went on for an indeterminable period of time, as she watched, frozen, something deep within her leaving her no doubt that she was watching someone die. 

She was unaware of the screams echoing throughout the classroom, the teacher rushing to phone for an ambulance, even of Michiru's tears, and vain efforts to comfort the boy's heaving body.

All she saw was the eternal, revolting and obsessing spectacle of the end of a human life.

His eyes began to roll up in his head, and it seemed, for just a moment, that those warm brown globes fixed on her own eyes, held her gaze, even as his body stilled and crumbled toward the ground.

She stood where she was, staring into space, long after the corpse had been taken and pronounced DOA at some hospital somewhere.

She was unaware as Michiru put gentle, fate-filled arms about her shoulders; unaware of that musical voice asking after her health. She didn't notice that she had put her arms around the girl, or that Michiru had collapsed against her in hysterics.

She could never remember how they came to be sitting in the same wretched little eatery where she had first laid eyes on Michiru's constant companion. 

She didn't even notice when the black rain began to fall over all the Earth, though her clothes were horribly stained with the stuff when she awoke, sprawled across Michiru's couch.


End file.
